Most home shoppers choose to purchase products online because it’s convenient. One click and almost any item can be delivered directly to the shopper’s home. While at first glance it may seem that home shopping has the added benefits of keeping cars off the road, reducing fuel consumption and the lowering the overall burden on transportation infrastructure, a new study finds that the opposite might be true.

Home shopping is nothing new: Consumers have used paper catalogs and phone purchasing methods for years. But with online shopping growing year after year, Arde Faghri, Director of the Delaware Center for Transportation and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware, led a new study to learn exactly what impact our home shopping habits are now having on the transportation sector.

“People are ordering more items online but at the same time their vehicle miles traveled (VMT)—the amount of mileage that one puts on their vehicle—has not decreased,” Faghri tells the Fuse. “So it seems like by ordering online, you increase the numbers of trucks on the roadways and simultaneously, in terms of VMT, you’re putting the same amount of mileage on the roadways as you used to.”

In his research of national VMT data, Faghri found that the only time numbers dipped was when gas prices approached four dollars per gallon several years ago. When gas prices are stable or dropping as they are now, Faghri says that people will put a relatively constant number of miles on their cars even if they’re saving themselves the travel time of shopping trips.

“What we noticed is that people order things online but their mileage behavior hasn’t changed. Maybe they forego driving for shopping for books or airline tickets or toys but they use that saved time to [drive to] other things that perhaps they didn’t before,” Faghri says.

Faghri’s multi-year study called “Impacts of Home Shopping on Vehicle Operations and Greenhouse Gas Emissions” has just been published in the International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology. He found that since 2001, an increase in home shopping has placed added burdens across four key measures of the transportation sector’s effectiveness: travel time, delays, average speed and vehicle emissions.

Faghri is concerned that the country’s transportation infrastructure is not prepared to handle the burden of heavy delivery trucks making frequent visits to residential neighborhoods.

Using the city of Newark in Delaware as a test case, Faghri and his co-authors surveyed local residents about their home shopping habits—including purchases made online, from catalogues, by interactive television, and by phone. With a similar 2001 survey in hand by way of comparison, Faghri discovered that home shopping habits within the city of Newark had only increased by about 14.8 percent over the past 14 years. However, despite this relatively small increase in home shopping, Faghri and his researchers found that travel time, delays, average speed and fuel consumption had all worsened significantly—far beyond what earlier studies had forecast as worst-case scenarios expected with even greater predicted home shopping usage.

But in addition to his study’s findings on the increases in congestion and VMT, Faghri is concerned that the country’s transportation infrastructure is not prepared to handle the burden of heavy delivery trucks making frequent visits to residential neighborhoods.

“I’m a civil engineer. My job is to design and construct roads. But the traditional way of thinking of design and the codes that we still use—we have to be realistic. They’re no longer valid,” Faghri explains. “Trucks are heavy and they’re everywhere. When we designed our pavements 20 years ago, we had one set of standards for the freeway and another for arterials and another for local and neighborhood streets all depending on the weight exerted on the roadway. Now we have to make our pavement much stronger. If we don’t, we’re going to have to pay a lot more for maintenance.”

But what if one shopper goes to a site like Amazon where he can purchase a litany of items that would never be available in a single store on one driving trip—items ranging from dog food to diapers to a snow shovel? Those items might then be delivered by a single delivery service that can bring everything in a single run—a FedEx, UPS or USPS type of service that is not directly contracted by the seller. Faghri notes that, in these cases, some of the impact on the transportation sector might then be mitigated as one truck can do the work of many.

But Faghri sees the solution to this problem as a complicated one requiring several layers of changes especially is it challenges multiple areas: Road congestion, weight of trucks on local pavement, and fuel efficiency.

“Problems like this should have a multitude of different approaches. Amazon has been considering drones for a while now,” Faghri says. “I think drones are a very, very realistic alternative to truck delivery.”

In the meantime, however, Faghri cautions that home shopping—and online shopping in particular—is not going anywhere and will only continue to grow. As a result, urban and road planners should take this new reality into consideration and build accordingly.

“It’s a fact of the 21st century and we do need to take that into consideration when we are planning, designing and constructing our roadways. Urban streets, neighborhood streets, local streets—they were not designed for the amount and the weight that these heavy trucks are exerting on the pavement, or to have trucks stop right in front of their entry for 15 to 20 to 25 minutes during rush hour.” Faghri says. “We didn’t take that into consideration. But now that we have those numbers, maybe we should.”

Faghri also adds that alternative fuels and hybrid electric trucks could resolve some of the fuel consumption challenges associated with increased home shopping—but this change alone would not be able to mitigate impact on pavement and congestion.

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The Fuse is an energy news and analysis site supported by Securing America’s Future Energy. The views expressed here are those of individual contributors and do not necessarily represent the views of the organization.

Issues in Focus

Safety Standards for Crude-By-Rail Shipments

A series of accidents in North America in recent years have raised concerns regarding rail shipments of crude oil. Fatal accidents in Lynchburg, Virginia, Lac-Megantic, Quebec, Fayette County, West Virginia, and (most recently) Culbertson, Montana have prompted public outcry and regulatory scrutiny.

2014 saw an all-time record of 144 oil train incidents in the U.S.—up from just one in 2009—causing a total of more than $7 million in damage.

The spate of crude-by-rail accidents has emerged from the confluence of three factors. First is the massive increase in oil movements by rail, which has increased more than three-fold since 2010. Second is the inadequate safety features of DOT-111 cars, particularly those constructed prior to 2011, which account for roughly 70 percent of tank cars on U.S. railroads. Third is the high volatility of oil produced from the Bakken and other shale formations, which makes this crude more prone towards combustion.

Of these three, rail car safety standards is the factor over which regulators can exert the most control. After months of regulatory review, on May 1, 2015, the White House and the Department of Transportation unveiled the new safety standards. The announcement also coincided with new tank car standards in Canada—a critical move, since many crude by rail shipments cross the U.S.-Canadian border. In the words DOT, the new rule:

Since the rule was announced, Republicans in Congress sought to roll back the provision calling for an advanced breaking system, following concerns from the rail industry that such an upgrade would be unnecessary and could cost billions of dollars. The advanced braking systems are required to be in place by 2021.

Democrats in Congress have argued that the new rules are insufficient to mitigate the danger. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) both issued statements arguing that the rules were insufficient and the timelines for safety improvements were too long.

The current industry standard car, the CPC-1232, came into usage in October 2011. These cars have half inch thick shells (marginally thicker than the DOT-111 7/16 inch shells) and advanced valves that are more resilient in the event of an accident. However, these newer cars were involved in the derailments and explosions in Virginia and West Virginia within the past year, raising questions about the validity of replacing only the DOT-111s manufactured before 2011.

Before the rule was finalized, early reports indicated that the rule submitted to the White House by the Department of Transportation has proposed a two-stage phase-out of the current fleet of railcars, focusing first on the pre-2011 cars, then the current standard CPC-1232 cars. In the final rule, DOT mandated a more aggressive timeline for retrofitting the CPC-1232 cars, imposing a deadline of April 1, 2020 for non-jacketed cars.

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DataSpotlight

The recent oil production boom in the United States, while astounding, has created a misleading narrative that the United States is no longer dependent on oil imports. Reports of surging domestic production, calls for relaxation of the crude oil export ban, labels of “Saudi America,” and the recent collapse in oil prices have created a perception that the United States has more oil than it knows what to do with.

This view is misguided. While some forecasts project that the United States could become a self-sufficient oil producer within the next decade, this remains a distant prospect. According to the April 2015 Short Term Energy Outlook, total U.S. crude oil production averaged an estimated 9.3 million barrels per day in March, while total oil demand in the country is over 19 million barrels per day.

This graphic helps illustrate the regional variations in crude oil supply and demand. North America, Europe, and Asia all run significant production deficits, with the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Former Soviet Union are global engines of crude oil supply.